In the News (Sun 16 Dec 18)

The Taliban are one of the mujahideen ("holy warriors" or "freedom fighters") groups that formed during the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan (1979-89).

Ties between the Taliban and these schools remain strong: when the Taliban were defeated in the city of Mazar-i-Sharif one of Pakistan's largest religious schools shut down for a month and sent thousands of students to Afghanistan as reinforcements.

The Taliban allowed terrorist organizations to run training camps in their territory and, from 1994 to at least 2001, provided refuge for Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organization.

The Taliban imposed a strict form of Islamic law, requiring women to wear head-to-toe veils, banning television, and jailing men whose beards were deemed too short.

In Pakistan, the most prominent Taliban leader is Pakistani-born Haji Omar, a 55-year-old veteran of the resistance against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and a former lieutenant to Mohammed Omar before 2001.

"This is an area of huge tactical and strategic significance for the Taliban extremists," he said in a statement.

Lt Col Yeaman said the aim of this series of operations was to clear out the Taliban and then build the physical infrastructure - especially patrol bases - to allow the Afghan National Army and police, supported by the International Security Assistance Force, to dominate these areas.

Lt Col Yeaman said a delicate balance was required in overcoming the Taliban by force and making them irrelevant through capacity building and winning the hearts and minds of the local population.

It was a bloody week for everyone as half a dozen ragged conflicts raged across a stretch of land the size of Britain, from the Indus river to the central highlands of Pakistan.

The hangar is known as the Taliban's Last Stand, and was left as a memento to the defeat of the hardline Islamic militia in 2001.

That raises the spectre of the confederation of warlord states that is in the process of emerging on the Pakistani side of the border effectively trebling in size with the addition of the Taliban-controlled zones in Afghanistan.

Taliban insurgents carried out 103 suicide bombings in Afghanistan in the first eight months of 2007, a 69 percent increase over the same period last year, according to a U.N. report that is expected to be issued publicly Monday.

Fair said that unlike suicide bombers in Iraq, where the vast majority of bombers are highly motivated and relatively well-educated foreigners, most suicide bombers in Afghanistan seem to be poor and uneducated Afghans, according to interviews with bombers captured before carrying out their attacks.

Former Taliban commanders said that 80 percent of the group's suicide bombers then pass through training facilities or safe houses in North and South Waziristan, two tribal areas in Pakistan that are militant strongholds.

The Taliban continued its siege of Kābul off and on throughout 1996 until it was able to advance and capture the city in September.

The Taliban regime provided safe harbor for Osama bin Laden, a militant Islamic leader who was identified by the United States as the mastermind of terrorist attacks against U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998 and U.S. landmarks in the United States on September 11, 2001.

Taliban leaders refused U.S. demands to surrender bin Laden, and in October the United States began aerial bombings of terrorist training camps and Talibanmilitary positions.

The Taliban believed women should stay home in order that their children did not have to grow up in the care of another, and also believed that work is the duty of the male in the house and to reject this duty was haraam.

Supporters of the Taliban suggested that the depression and the other problems plaguing Afghani women were the result of dire poverty, years of war, the bad economy, and the fact that many were left war widows, and could no longer provide food for their families without some sort of international aid.

The Taliban stated that women were obliged to wear the burqa due to Islamic teachings which state that women must cover up her body in front of non-mahram men, and that both men and women should dress modestly.

The Taliban believed women should stay home in order that their children did not have to grow up in the care of another, and also believed that work is the duty of the male in the house and to reject this duty was haraam.

Supporters of the Taliban suggested that the depression and the other problems plaguing Afghan women were the result of dire poverty, years of war, the bad economy, and the fact that many were left war widows, and could no longer provide food for their families without some sort of international aid.

The Taliban stated that women were obliged to wear the burqa due to Islamic teachings which state that women must cover up her body in front of non-mahram men, and that both men and women should dress modestly.

The Taliban, which controls approximately 90 percent of the country, claimed in mid-1999 that it was drafting a new constitution, based upon the sources of Islamic religious law (Shari'a): the Koran, the Sunna, and Hanafi jurisprudence.

The Taliban decreed that women are not allowed to attend the country's formerly coeducational universities, and one women's university, the Kabul branch of the Peshawar-based AfghanUniversity, was closed by the Taliban in 1996 after it gained control of Kabul.

For example, the Taliban allegedly orders Shi'a Muslims to confine their Ashura commemorations during the month of Muharram to their mosques and to avoid the public processions that are an integral part of Ashura in other countries with Shi'a populations.

www.state.gov /g/drl/rls/irf/2001/index.cfm?docid=5533 (4941 words)

The Taliban's War on Women: A Health and Human Rights Crisis in Afghanistan.(Site not responding. Last check: )

Taliban policies that restrict women's rights and deny basic needs are often brutally and arbitrary enforced by the "religious police" (Department for the Propagation of Virtue and the Suppression of Vice) usually in the form of summary, public beatings.

That Taliban officials now claim to be "restoring peace" to Afghanistan is perhaps one of the cruelest ironies of our time, as they have virtually imprisoned Afghan women in their homes and threatened their very survival.

The "peace" imposed on that portion of the country under Taliban rule is the peace of the burqa, the quiet of women and girls cowering in their homes, and the silence of a citizenry terrorized by the Taliban's violent and arbitrary application of their version of Shari'a law.

www.phrusa.org /research/health_effects/exec.html (5274 words)

Terror Tuesday: Impact on South Asia -- Taliban-Profile(Site not responding. Last check: )

The Taliban by that time were controlling 27 provinces of Afghanistan, and the remaining three in the north were under the control of Uzbek-warlord Abdur RashidDostum.

The Taliban leadership has indicated that their aim is to set up the world's ‘purest’ Islamist state, banning what they perceive as corrupting agents and frivolities like television, music and cinema.

The Taliban armory is currently stocked with adequate weapons, including an air force, to sustain current, and even enhanced, levels of operation, as a result of the ISI's vigorous assistance.

Under the Taliban regime, girls' schools were closed and women were forced to quit their jobs (at one time, 40 percent of Afghan doctors were female) and to wear a head-to-toe garment known as the burkha.

The Taliban are poorly tutored in Islamic and Afghan history, knowledge of the Sharia [Islamic law] and the Koran and the political and theoretical developments in the Muslim world during the twentieth century.

Unlike some opponents of the Taliban, Rashid does not dismiss the group as a mere puppet of the neighboring state of Pakistan; he emphasizes that it is primarily an indigenous Afghan movement that, in fact, poses an imminent threat to Pakistan.

On September 27, 1996, the Taliban, an extremist militia, seized control of the capital of Afghanistan, Kabul, and violently plunged the occupied territories of Afghanistan into a brutal state of gender apartheid in which women and girls have been stripped of their basic human rights.

Prior to the Civil War and Taliban control, especially in Kabul, the capital, women in Afghanistan were educated and employed: 50% of the students and 60% of the teachers at KabulUniversity were women, and 70% of school teachers, 50% of civilian government workers, and 40% of doctors in Kabul were women.

Added to the Taliban's barbaric rule, the region is suffering under the most severe drought in decades and military incursions continue to displace hundreds of thousands of Afghans.

This stems from the fact that taliban, as simply one component of a religious establishment, have always lived in the shadow of military, political and economic elites.

The lack of experience among the Taliban leaders in political, diplomatic, economic and cultural affairs, as well as their determination to interpret human rights on the basis of a particular school of religious thought rather than according to more widely accepted contemporary principles, brings the Taliban into confrontation with the logic of today's world.

The Taliban cannot understand why it should be the world's business when they, for instance, amputate the hand of a thief, or stone to death an adulterer, as prescribed by Islamic criminal law.